Fibers and they being discrete space

1.1k Views Asked by At

When talking about fibers in topology and geometry, especially in fiber bundle, vector bundle and fibration, it is said that they are discrete spaces. But in some diagrams I see, they are often depicted as real lines over base space, which seems to suggest they are not discrete spaces. From what I understand intuitively, discrete spaces are the spaces where all points are isolated, and a real line is definitely not a discrete space. So, are depictions just misleading? Or am I understanding something wrongly..?

OK, so here's the reference to what I am talking about (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covering_space#Formal_definition):

Let X be a topological space. A covering space of X is a space C together with a continuous surjective map

$p \colon C \to X\,$

such that for every x ∈ X, there exists an open neighborhood U of x, such that p−1(U) (the inverse image of U under p) is a union of disjoint open sets in C, each of which is mapped homeomorphically onto U by p.

The map p is called the covering map, the space X is often called the base space of the covering, and the space C is called the total space of the covering. For any point x in the base the inverse image of x in C is necessarily a discrete space called the fiber over x.

1

There are 1 best solutions below

0
On BEST ANSWER

A fiber bundle with discrete fiber is precisely a covering space. Since the definition you supplied is only talking about covering spaces, there is no contradiction here.

In general, the fiber of a fiber bundle can be any topological space $F$. Just consider the trivial fiber bundle $X \times F$ over any space $X$.